The beast’s name is TwitterFacebookYoutubeRSSFlickr.

It hides in the sites where you network, using tweets or updates, videos or photos to increase your followers/friends/hits.

These are great sites, and, if you work them, they will definitely work for you.

BUT they can easily consume a precious hour or more every day, cutting into the your studio time. That would be the beast part.

At the 2009 smARtist telesummit, networking visibility expert Nancy Marmolejo gave some fabulous tips for taming it.

Here’s one:

Feed your tweets into your Facebook page using the “Twitter” application within Facebook.

1. You’ll find Facebook applications on your home page, in the very bottom left corner.

2. Click on it and a menu pops up.

3. Pick “Browse more applications.”

4. On the next page, type “Twitter” into the search box.

5. On the results page, find the Twitter application. Make sure it’s the application by Twitter–there are some imposters.

6. Click on it. On the page that appears, click on “Go to application.”

7. Enter your Twitter username and password. [It's OK, you're giving these to Twitter. They own and run this application.]

8. Voila! All your tweets will also appear as Facebook updates.

Now that’s pretty neat. But there’s a drawback.

If you’re one of the people who tweet a lot, you’re going to have a lot of Facebook updates. Everything you tweet shows up on your Facebook page. Whether or not it makes sense. This can annoy some people so much they hide you on their Facebook page.

But there’s another nifty Facebook application that fixes this. It’s called “Selective Twitter Status.” If you use this application instead when you get to step #5 above, you can choose which tweets go to your Facebook page. When you tweet, just add #fb to the end of the ones you want to show up in Facebook.

Voila!

The beast, tamed two ways.

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When it comes to tips and tricks for your art career, nothing’s better than those 7 days of the smARTist Telesummit 2009!

Twitter works like this for lots of people:

1. You sign up and start tweeting enthusiastically.

2. Your list of followers grows slllooooowwwly. You wonder how all those other people got to 3000–or 300–followers. Isn’t Twitter supposed to be social networking magic?

3. You tweet less and less frequently. Eventually, you stop altogether.

If this is you, don’t despair. At the 2009 Smartist telesummit, Joan Stewart, the social networking maven, had a great suggestion about how to find your tweeps.

Use the search box.

Let’s say you’re a painter–and you paint dog portraits. Dog owners would make great clients for you. So you type ‘dog owners’ or ‘dogs’ or even ‘I love my dog’ into the search box–and voila! You have a bunch of potential clients. Chances are, if you follow them, they’ll follow you back.

But–and here’s the key–don’t say hello with a sales pitch. Next time, we’ll talk about how to keep people reading your tweets.

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When it comes to tips and tricks for your art career, nothing’s better than those 7-days of the smARTist Telesummit 2009!

Twitter can drive people to websites. Just put a URL in your tweet and there they go.

Hypothetically.

Finding out whether or not they went is another matter.

If it’s your website you’re driving them to, you could use Google analytics to find out if your tweets bump your traffic up. (What? You don’t have Google analytics installed? It just takes pasting a little code into one of your pages and you really can’t afford to be without them. Go now. I beg you.)

But it takes 24 hours to get analytics data–and you can’t tell exactly when someone visited. So that alone won’t  help you know how effective your tweet was about your fabulous new show/sale/commission/medium/press coverage.

BudURL to the rescue. This nifty free service does two things at once:

1. It converts long URLs to short ones that take up fewer characters

2. It also tracks hits–and continuously updates them.

Post your tweet, then go back to your BudURL account page. Watch, in real time, as people hit the URL you posted.

This is pretty useful for a couple of reasons. You can…

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I confess: Twitter has totally seduced me. Without a phone booth in sight, I can switch into my Twitter cape and tights in the blink of an eye.

But it hasn’t always been this way.

Back in August of ’07, like many, many others, I thought Social Media was a huge waste of time. And I found it impossible to imagine why people I highly respected, like master coach and artist Molly Gordon, MCC, and Joan Stewart, kick-ass free publicity maven (both three-time presenters on the annual smARTist Telesummit), were bothering.

Then I was drawn into a free series of teleseminars on Social Media (yup, free gets me too!) and by the end I got it: the word social was a historical reference to the beginning of the Facebook phenomenon, when college students wanted to stay connected to friends.

But like all things web-related…

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After spending the last five months figuring out this Social Media thing, getting set up on Facebook, finding an expert for smARTist Telesummit 2009, and encouraging artists to jump into this vast and ever expanding ocean, the predictably unpredictable  world of all things online has thrown me, and you, not just a curve ball, but…

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